Voice Tech: Coming Soon To A Classroom Near You

Voice technology has become a familiar presence in the home, but now it’s on the verge of making a breakthrough into the classroom.

Around one in four U.S. households now have a smart speaker, with more than 120 million units sold. A similar proportion of U.K. households have installed them, using them as personal aides, children’s entertainers and as another member of the family.

And just as Alexa has become a valuable assistant in the home, there is a growing awareness of the potential for voice technology to make a difference in the classroom as well.

Education publishing multinational Scholastic worked on its own speech recognition software in the late 1990s, but abandoned the project in the face of technical problems.

But advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning mean it is a technology whose time has now come, says Margery Mayer, who served for 25 years as President of Education at publishing multinational Scholastic.

“Speech recognition holds the potential to revolutionize the classroom—not to mention toys and other applications—by transforming the way children interact with technology,” she said.

“In a few years, I have no doubt this technology will be part of every reading classroom, and educators will be able to say with certainty it accelerates reading skills in young students.”

Differences in the way children speak compared with adults means voice tech for children has lagged behind the adult version, according to Patricia Scanlon, founder of Dublin-based software company SoapBox Labs, one of a number of companies bringing voice tech into the classroom

This is not just in pitch and tone, or even vocabulary, but also how children structure their speech.

As a result, it is only recently that voice tech was considered up to the task.

“Voice tech for children is about 10 years behind that of adults,” said Scanlon, named by Forbes as one of the World’s Top 50 Women in Tech in 2018. “If you don’t have the accuracy, it will never take off.

“The vision that it could be transformative was there, but the technology to be able to make that step change was not there.”

Much of the focus on using voice tech is around helping children learn to read. While a teacher can work with a small group of children at a time, tech expands the amount of time children can practice, at the same time as collecting data on how they are progressing.

“You can multiply how much can be done and the data can be fed to the teacher so they understand every child’s level,” said SoapBox Labs chief operating officer Jamie Beaumont.

“It is not a substitute for a teacher, it is very much an augmentation, where the teacher can listen to the audio file of the child reading. The reading can even be done at home with the parent, and the results available to the teacher.”

Voice tech is not just able to provide data on how children are reading, it can also provide feedback to the child, including prompting them to correct their pronunciation.

It could also help diagnose dyslexia at a much earlier age, enabling teachers to put interventions in place years before they might otherwise happen, Beaumont added.

“Voice tech is now as good as an adult listener,” he said. “It can change the way we’re able to help kids develop literacy and accelerate their language ability.”

While the technology is now being trialled in schools, there is still some way to go before it is widely available. And the history of edtech is littered with false dawns, of technology that promised to light up the classroom only to quickly fade away.

Cost and ease of use are likely to be the major obstacles, but if voice tech can overcome those it could make a breakthrough. Only time will tell if it has got what it takes to make an impact, but all the signs are that it has the potential to live up to the hype.